Anyone who hasn't been living under a rock the last two or three years knows that professional video gaming has exploded in East Asia and Europe (and, to a lesser extent, North America).
Similarly, anyone who hasn't been living under a rock has also heard the reports of match-fixing and rigging in various video game leagues and tournaments where the matches can actually be gambled on.
So I turn to Deadspin this Sunday morning to find this headline on their first article, heading to their video-game arm Kotaku:
Match-Fixing Report Shows How Gambling Has Ruined Korean StarCraft
StarCraft is usually a one-on-one space-based strategy game where players build buildings to mine resources and create armaments to destroy the other player off the map.
It is also where Brian Tuohy first exposed me to the fact that many of these leagues in Korea (where E-Sports is actually a lot of their "sports"!) have their professional matches wagered on, which has led to match-fixing scandals.
Fast-forward to today's article. Almost three months after a StarCraft World Champion was taken into custody in the process of a significant national prosecutorial investigation into e-sports and the match-fixing which has come with some of the betting thereto, a report has been filed by said prosecutors.
The player Lee "Life" Seung Hyun, now is arrested for match-fixing in Korean tournaments. One of the most damning things for the future of e-sports in Korea is the scope of the payment: Because of the player involved and his almost-singular stature within the e-sport of StarCraft, he was offered approximately $62,000 by the match-fixers to throw two matches in a Korean Cup tournament -- in a tournament which might have netted him a first prize of about $8,000-$9,000!!
A second player, Bung Woo Yong, was arrested for taking half that amount to throw one match. In the tournament in which he threw his match, according to the Kotaku article, he made about as much throwing the match as he would've the entire SEASON he was actually playing in.
Six other parties were also arrested in the scheme, according to a report on an e-sports team site.
The report basically also blows the lid off of the fact that this is a systematic situation, and it is occurring all over the place in competitive StarCraft.
Given this, there is a demand that KeSPA -- The Korean E-Sports Association -- do something about all of this.
In a realistic sense, I can only think of one place to start: Shutting down competitive StarCraft until it is made clear that the game can be cleaned up from the gambling. When the first reports of this were coming out, Blizzard (the creators of the game) seized material control of the professional StarCraft world -- to absolutely no apparent effect.
The facts are simple: As long as these video games are being gambled on in Korea, they're dirty. Whether every match is being fixed is irrelevant. When you have one of the, if not THE, key figure in your sport part of a widespread match-fixing epidemic and your profit from throwing matches is a multiplied factor of (in his case) the entire tournament's winnings or (in Bung Woo Yong's) the entire season's top winnings, it's time to baby-and-bathwater the entire mess and shut it down.
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